I. Field
The present invention pertains generally to the field of communications and more specifically to a novel and improved system and method for allocating a plurality of data streams onto a single channel.
II. Background
A remote station is located within a network. The remote station includes applications that produce logical data streams. The remote station allocates the logical data streams onto a single transport stream. A technique for multiplexing data from logical data streams onto a transport stream is disclosed in U.S. application Ser. No. 09/612,825, filed Feb. 8, 1999, entitled “METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PROPORTIONATELY MULTIPLEXING DATA STREAMS ONTO ONE DATA STREAM,” now allowed which is assigned to the assignee of the present invention and incorporated by reference herein.
Choosing an allocation scheme for allocating bits from multiple data streams onto a single channel is difficult because a number of factors have to be taken into consideration. One factor that has to be considered is the priority of each data stream. Higher priority data streams take precedence over lower priority data streams. Another factor that has to be considered is the type of transport format combinations (TFCs) that are allowed. A TFC is a combination of transport frames to be sent out on a wireless link of the remote station at each time slot. A transport format has a number of blocks (i.e. one or more blocks) and a block size. An allocation scheme that takes into consideration the priority of data streams and the TFCs available is desired.
It is also desirable to have an allocation scheme that selects TFCs without having to pad the TFCs, which wastes valuable space. In addition, throughput is improved when TFC do not have to be padded because the TFCs that are transmitted over the transport channel are full. Some allocation schemes pad TFCs. In these padded allocation schemes, a TFC is padded when the TFC is not completely filled with bits from the logical data streams.